Tag Archive for 'tonal'

Verve Letterpress Woodgrain Business Cards

Designer of luxury stationery Leslie Vega created these business cards for the photographers of Verve Studio. Visit her blog post here for some additional images and details.

These letterpress business cards took us some time in production with six passes through the press. They feature a brown paper imprinted with a woodgrain texture in tonal varnish with the text in a metallic silver ink overprint. The offwhite side of the card is printed in three colors in tight, tight register. The stock is custom duplexed Crane Lettra Pearl White 110lb cover to Wausau Royal Complements Chocolate Truffle 100lb cover. The final card was round corner die cut to size.

Taiga - Douglas Quin Letterpress LP

Fathom, the recent release LP from Taiga records, is a subtle and textural object of beauty and a sensory experience. The drawings were perfectly suited for letterpress and translated crisply to the printed edition. This is the description from Taiga:

“Douglas Quin’s Fathom brings together four extended underwater soundscapes—two each from the Arctic and Antarctic. The recordings have been gathered over a period of 15 years, capturing an extraordinary palette of sonic voices, events, spaces, and textures. To the human ear, these soundscapes are haunting and otherworldly; yet they are very much of this world—out of earreach. The tracks are minimally edited and are his first field recordings to be archived in vinyl. Included with the release is a sealed envelope containing an insert with specific locations, animals, and other elements heard, giving listeners the option to absorb sound with or without association. The envelope is printed with liner notes and comments from Dutch journalist and music critic René van Peer. Mastered by James Plotkin, cut direct to metal and pressed on 200 gram virgin-vinyl, Fathom comes packaged in custom letterpressed materials and is presented as a limited edition of 1000.”

There was clear, white, and black vinyl versions released. Only the black is still available.

The packaging is pressed in gray and a tonal white ink. We letterpress printed the outer sleeve on a custom duplexed stock - gray on the interior, white on the exterior. We were able to print on a preconverted inner envelope which accompanies the vinyl and containing the insert.

Tone-on-tone white and black inks

We have a lot of requests for blind (inkless) impression with letterpress plates. However, a tonal ink is often something we suggest rather than a truly blind impression. If the stock being printed does not lend itself to deep impression, the artwork needs some legibility or the art work is on both sides of the sheet, a blind hit can be ill advised. The amount of impression needed to clearly read a completely blind hit will create impression show through on the reverse side of the printed piece. One of the ways we get around this is to mix a tonal ink, shown here on both black and white business card samples. By printing a tone, we can lessen the impression and dial up the legibility a bit.

The black stock is 200lb Wausau Eclipse Black. It is letterpress printed with a black and silver ink mix.

The white stock is 220lb Crane Lettra Flo. White. It is letterpress printed with opaque white ink contaminated with 877 silver.

_0001_white_ink_white_paper_logo

_0004_blacksilver_ink_black_paper_logo